History of the RSM - April 2011

Improvised bookmarks

The use of improvised bookmarks may sometimes be tempting but can never be recommended. Illustrated here are a few examples that have fallen from the pages of some of our older library books. It is with mixed feelings that library staff have discovered them. Delight at handling such material links with our past is mingled with some anxiety at their possible effect over the years on the books.

Which reader was it who enjoyed a Cadbury's chocolate bar, its flavour enhanced, perhaps, by recent memories of food rationing, while studying a text on digestive diseases?

Who was the reader who alighted from the 27 bus at Warren Street Station and marked their place in a psychiatry book with their tupenny-halfpenny ticket?

And which of our members was moved to purchase a card from an ex-serviceman and used it to mark a crucial passage in a work on orthopaedic surgery?

With the introduction of acid-free and archive standard bookmarks such a miscellany of interesting objects is unlikely ever to be found again in the future. On the bright side, though, is the benefit to our book and journal stock.

A few more examples of improvised bookmarks can be seen in the current library exhibition, The Library of the Royal Society of Medicine: An Historical Miscellany which is open to the public and runs until April 21st 2011.

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Previous features of the month:

• March 2011 - The Blitz
• February 2011 - The RSM Library
• January 2011 - Albert J. Edmunds
• December 2010 - Edward Law Memorial Fund
• November 2010 - George Francis Home
• October 2010 - Herbals
• September 2010 - Florence Nightingale's letters
• August 2010 - Florence Nightingale
• July 2010 - Robert Lee
• June 2010 - William Withering
• May 2010 - Robert Lee
• April 2010 - Henry Jenkins